Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. There are a few things I want to say. It seems there is now a decent Garda presence in Dublin city. I said at a meeting of the justice committee that my business means that I traverse the city up to four times a day, moving from here to there. I see the absence of policing in Dublin. Gardaí are not there. They are not visible. They are not out on the street and where they are, they are not there in sufficient numbers. I am glad that an effort is now being made to increase and boost the presence of gardaí in the streets of Dublin.

There are parts of Dublin where things have happened that one could not imagine happening if there was a real risk of a Garda presence within 100 yards. A young girl was dragged down a lane-way near St. Mary's Abbey. She was, I imagine, about to be killed. She was wrapped up in duct tape and flung under a car when two other girls heard her scream. That happened in the heart of our city.

I saw footage from Ballybrack where grown women in their 40s were screaming abuse at gardaí from 6 in. in front of their faces, calling them this, that and the other. They called them scumbags and were screaming hatred and abuse at gardaí. The Garda Commissioner has agreed that the right of assembly of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution is for peaceful assembly. There is no right to assemble for violence. There is no right to assemble with a view to causing a breach of the public peace. When I see the barricades around these Houses, I ask myself if that is a victory for a group of sinister people who are recruiting gullible, ignorant people to do their dirty work for them. Is it a victory for them that we are now sitting behind a miniature wall of steel?

I agree with Senators Flynn and Ruane, up to a point. I agree that the people who burned a Luas tram and a bus, and who smashed into Foot Locker and Arnotts, are not right-wing ideologues. There is a cohort of right-wing people, or xenophobic and racist people, if you want to call them that. They are not armchair generals; they are sitting in front of their screens and inciting other people to break the law. Those people have to be dealt with. The Minister has said she wants the hate speech law updated to deal with the Internet age, at the very least. I have no problem at all with that. However, once we go down that road, we must consider what British politicians have claimed is hatred, such as chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."Is that hatred? You can have your views, one way or the other, as to what it denotes or connotes but the suggestion was made by the British Home Secretary that anybody who said that should be arrested. I want definition in the Minister's proposed legislation on what hatred is or is not. The Minister came in here and said she was told by the Attorney General that to define hatred or offer any definition of it would make prosecutions more difficult. That is not an excuse. It has to mean something; something either is or is not hate speech. It has to be clear to the arresting garda.

In their hate speech legislation, the British took a look at the power of citizen's arrest and they said it does not apply in this case because you would have right-wing people arresting left-wing people and left-wing people arresting right-wing people for hate speech. I implore the Minister to listen to what I am saying and not to give people on the street the right to arrest each other because they suspect them of hate speech. If we can make some progress on that, then the badly-needed reform of our laws on hatred and incitement to hatred can go ahead. The Minister should not try to bulldoze it through the House on the back of the disorder last Thursday.